Tuesday, August 18, 2009

We are the Playwrights' Gymnasium

"The Playwrights' Gym is different from any other 'writers group' I've ever been a part of, in that it's focused on process rather than product. As such, you're really invited to stretch yourself. I've consistently written things that would never have come from me had it not been for the exercises we tackle in this group."

-- Eric C. Peterson

The Playwrights' Gymnasium was founded in 2004 by Washington DC playwrights D.W. Gregory and Paul Donnelly.

The group meets monthly at Flashpoint (9th & G Streets, NW) to stretch themselves as artists by writing toward specific exercises, such as:

Take a comic scene you've already written and re-write it as though it were a tragedy. Or, take a dramatic scene you've already written and re-write it as though it were a comedy. What did you have to do, aside from adding or removing jokes from the scene? Did your characters change considerably from one form to another? What else had to change in order to write for a different genre?

Take a play you've already written, and locate a scene that you feel is "missing something." Then, reflect on what the characters in the scene were doing one minute before the scene started. Then five minutes before. Then an hour before. Then six hours before. Then 24 hours before. Now, write a scene that takes place anywhere from 36 to 18 hours before this scene. What do you now know about the characters and their situation that can inform the original scene?

Write a series of "emotional states" (i.e., elated, exhausted, fearful, angry, bored) on a deck of index cards. Pick three cards at random and pass them to the person on your right. Now, take the three cards from the person on your left and write a three-person scene featuring the personifications of these three emotional states. How did writing while leading with emotion (as opposed to plot or other character attributes) affect your writing? Were the emotional states of your characters static or did they change as the scene progressed?

"For me, the exercises that were jumping off points for new work were ones I found most rewarding and most useful. Through one of these assignments, I wrote a short play called Red Ball which was soon after selected to be one of the shorts presented during the ATHE conference in New York."

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Who Are We?

The Playwright's Gymnasium is a group of playwrights in the Washington DC/Baltimore area who meet on a monthly basis to explore their writing process through the use of facilitated exercises. Inspired by the writings of Michael Wright (Playwriting in Process), we believe that any writer, of any level of experience, can benefit from stepping away from the work to examine the way that he or she works. Through exercises that isolate a specific element of dramatic writing, such as characterization, plotting, or structure, we gain insights into our work and our process that we apply to our writing generally.

Our members have worked professionally in Washington, all over the US, and around the world, with productions, readings, and workshops at Imagination Stage, Actors' Theatre of Louisville, The New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theatre, the Capital Fringe Festival, the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, the Dayton FutureFest, the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway New Play Festival and others.